The sun was slowly moving towards the west, but the heat from which it came did not abate at all. Five boys and ten girls worked in the fields all day in the blazing sun. They were all over the age of ten and under the age of fifteen.

Afterthe holidays, parents spent some of their children's salaries, which they earned during the summer holidays, on general purchases, rarely gave money to anyone at once, but more often this money was spent at the school bazaar, which was held in a neighboring village on the penultimate Saturday in August.

After work, already at six o'clock in the evening, the guys moved towards the village. As they approached their yards, they accelerated and ran faster, almost headlong.

After drinking some water from the well, some compote from the pot, they ran out to the back yard, where there was a pond nearby, which was half overgrown with reeds. In some places it was so deep that none of the boys could dive to the bottom to touch with their hands or feet.

Vasily and Alexey were the last to reach the pond bank, or rather, they rolled two large wheels from the combine, which Alexey's father had pumped up very tightly since the previous evening. All they had to do now was tie them together with a rope that was very thick.

After a lot of effort, the guys still managed to link the two cameras together. Throwing them into the water, they almost knocked down another boy, SlavikA. He was in the fifth grade and was the only boy from his village, so he didn't have a friend and went almost everywhere by himself, and no one ever bothered him much. He almost always wore the same expression on his face, despite his rather young age.

The water was a little cold, because it hadn't had time to warm up after last night's chill, but the boys didn'tmind. They spent more than an hour swimming, shouting, laughing, and swimming in the shallow water at the end of the pond. They ran in and out of the reeds, shouting and hooting like Indians with spears, which they replaced with green cobs of reeds.

At last they had all bathed so thoroughly that they no longer wanted to scream. Their voices were already quite low, and the words came out in fragments that didn't belong together.

My parents were already home, and the cows were fed. After drinking milk, eating bread or potatoes cooked in a pot and sprinkled with dill, the children ran outside to ride a bicycle.

From afar, a car drove at high speed through the center of the village, despite the fact that children were riding bicycles, and very young children were playing catch-up in the middle of the road. The older kids called out to each other andgrabbed all the kids by force and moved them out of the way. The car did not even think to stop and continued to approach, leaving a column of dust in its wake. But as she neared the place where they were playing, she stopped. A father and son got out of the cab.

"It's very beautiful and quiet here," the father said to his son and added:

– More than thirty years have passed since all the people moved out of here, since the collective farm collapsed, but almost all the houses are intact, although everywhere the grass is overgrown to the knees. Perhaps children were playing in this place…

– Here is this one for me, which is with these things on the sides, – said Ruslan to the salesman in the store for fishermen, and at his request he was brought a spinning rod, which was the best in its class for this price.

Ruslan did not try to delve into the names of fishing gear, he generally believed that the name is secondary, or rather, it does not matter at all. Ruslan was a representative of the absolute representative of the engineer, who believed that the namesof objects are not needed at all, you can just number them. The so-called supreme representative of scientific snobbery. He never said these things out loud, because people would think he was crazy, or at least a man with cockroaches in his head.

For people who noticed this habit in him and started asking questions, he liked to repeat the same phrase that their physics teacher Sergey Lvovich, who at the age of 33 was an honorary employee of many universities around the world, repeated to them. He often saw him in the city after graduating from university, but then there was a rumor that he was given a scientific laboratory in one of the cities and he left. No one saw him after that. There were rumors that he had won a prestigious science prize, but no one could really say anything.

After buying everything he needed, Ruslan left the store, whistling, because everything was ready for tomorrow's trip to the taiga, he had bought provisions, fuel, a tent and everything else last week. Today was Monday, and being a punctual person, he decided to go fishing on vacation with three days of overnight stay on Monday. He always started a new business on Monday, because he considered rest also work, or rather, part of the work.

Sunday afternoon was cool in the city. The end of August, although it was a calendar summer, but this year it was quite cool. It got colder around mid-August, although the summer itself was very hot. He was engaged in the sale andinstallation of air conditioners, so the revenue for the season turned out to be good. He did not want to study science, although he was offered to stay in graduate school. There was no perseverance and fundamentality in it, Ruslan preferred actions that give visible work.

He didn't really like fishing, but at some point, more precisely, a week ago, after watching a video of survivalists in the forest on one of the video hosting sites, he suddenly wanted to go deep into the forest and go fishing on the riverbank for a couple of days, take photos.

Ruslan wanted to challenge the regularity of his work, which he had already had enough of.

He didn't have any social networks, sono one would have seen these pictures anyway, except for a couple of friends, but he decided to fulfill the desire that he had even with the heat downturn and after a sharp decline in orders for installing climate systems after the onset of cool weather after a prolonged heat wave.

There was only one way to get to your destination, along a dirt road. For this purpose, he agreed with the companyof the taxi profile that he would be taken to a certain place and after three days they would pick him up from this place back. The main thing was that the car was cargo and passable, with an experienced driver and other requirements that Ruslan voiced to them through the dispatcher.

РRenan sat in the kitchen, drinking in the fragrant tea he'd bought the day before, but he couldn't quite remember the name. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see two large backpacks of different colors, brands, and materials lying in the hallway, waiting to be taken to the woods tomorrow.

"I have to go to bed, get up early tomorrow.

Opening the window in the kitchen halfway, Ruslan slowly wandered into the bedroom, as if reluctantly, under duress. On Monday morning, he woke up early and couldn't even immediately remember what time he fell asleep. He ate breakfast and, after looking through all the rooms of the apartment, put one backpack on his back, grabbed the other with his hands, went out into the courtyard of the house and sat down on a bench. There was a morning fog, but it was so thick that a person with a rich imagination would immediately imagine that the giant had put the kettle on and forgotten to boil it. The taxi car did not appear in the courtyard by the appointed time, but just two minutes later, with a delay, Ruslan saw two fog lights driving into the courtyard. He picked up his backpacks and walked towards the car.

– Hello, – said Ruslan very cheerfully, but the driver did not answer him anything. He got out of the car without a word, opened the trunk door, and lit a cigarette.